cover image White Lightning

White Lightning

Kent Wright. DH Audio, $7.99 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-88646-488-2

DH Audio has been diversifying its catalogue by introducing a number of genre fiction series, including its Mira romances and Gold Eagle action adventures. These bargain-priced titles are unabashedly aimed at a downscale popular market--and hence are as suited for sale in a truck stop as a bookstore. This new Rolling Thunder stock car racing series, based on the mass market novels, attempts to crack that difficult audio category: sports. Will NASCAR racing's predominantly male audience respond to this brand of pulpy fiction? If so, will they choose to do so in its audio format? (Picture the tape playing in a pickup truck with a rebel flag painted on the hood.) This tape appeals to the nostalgic romance of stock car racing's Southern roots: ""the almost mystical time."" It's 1959 and Jodell Bob Lee, grandson of a moonshiner, is running a carload of hooch from Tennessee across the North Carolina border. Driving his souped-up flathead V-8 Ford, he feels his car ""become a part of him"" as his engine howls. This is his call to greatness; he's soon to join the ranks of dirt track legends J. Junior Johnson and Lee Petty. Read aloud, the tale has an irresistible hokey charm, diverting and entertaining in its free mix of fact and fiction. Based on the 1999 Tor mass market. (June)